Radial dynamics of an encapsulated microbubble with interface energy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a surface continuum mechanics model incorporating interface energy to analyze encapsulated microbubble dynamics, revealing the significant effects of interface strain and curvature, validated against experimental data.

Contribution

The study presents a novel interface energy-based model capturing the coupled effects of interface strain and curvature on bubble dynamics, validated with experimental data.

Findings

Interface area strain significantly affects bubble behavior.

Coupled stretch and curvature influence compression dynamics.

Model accurately fits experimental bubble size data.

Abstract

In this work, a mathematical model based on interface energy is proposed within the framework of surface continuum mechanics to study the dynamics of encapsulated bubbles. The interface model naturally induces a residual stress field into the bulk of the bubble, with possible expansion/shrinkage from a stress-free configuration to a natural equilibrium configuration. The significant influence of interface area strain and the coupled effect of stretch and curvature is observed in the numerical simulations based on constrained optimization. Due to the bending rigidity related to additional terms, the dynamic interface tension can become negative, but not due to the interface area strain. The coupled effect of interface strain and curvature term observed is new and plays a dominant role in the dominant compression behavior of encapsulated bubbles observed in the experiments. We validate our model by fitting experimental data of $1.7\,\mu$m, $1.4\,\mu$m, and $1\,\mu$m radii bubbles by calculating the optimized parameters. Our work also highlights the role of interface parameters and natural configuration gas pressure in estimating the size-independent viscoelastic material properties of encapsulated bubbles with interesting future developments.